Umax’ USB scanner

Being a USB device, this flatbed scanner installs easily. The most attractive feature is the four buttons on its front panel. The first lets you scan a document and open it automatically in a selected graphics application. The second sends scanned documents to a printer. The third button can be configured to send the scan as an e-mail attachment, fax it or open the recognized (OCR) document in a text editor. The last one is for power saving, and it turns off the scanner’s CCD lamp when not in use. Given these functions, the scanner is suitable for small office setup.

The scanner gives two scanning modes–simple and advanced. The latter lets you select the scan resolution, scan mode, color depth, de-screening options, filter, and enlargement.

When we tested it, the scanner gave very good quality scans at higher resolutions. We scanned some artwork at 72, 150 and 300 dpi and got good output at 150 and 300 dpi. However, the quality of 72 dpi (suited for Web graphics) was not satisfactory. Line-art scans were pretty good, though we did find that at 300 and 600 dpi resolutions, the scanned lines appeared slightly thicker. At 1200 dpi, line-art scans were good, and it managed to capture most of the finer details.

The scanner’s speed of scanning was a bit slow compared to others we’ve seen. A preview scan took about 29 sec. Color scans of an A4-sized artwork took about 2 min and 40 sec at 72 dpi, and a little less than 6 min at 150 and 300 dpi.

Grayscale scans of the same artwork took a minute and a half at all three resolutions. We even dared a colored scan at 1200 dpi, and had to wait for about an hour for the output. Scans at such resolutions are not very common though.

The scanner comes with some pretty good bundled software, which includes Presto! Page Manager and VistaShuttle for creating calendars, managing photo albums, wallpapers, and screen savers. For powerful photo editing, the scanner comes with Adobe Photoshop 5.0 Limited Edition. It also comes bundled with two OCR software—Recognita Standard OCR 3.2 and Caere OmniPage Limited Edition 5.1. Both showed good results with simple paragraph based documents. The former could save the recognized text as only simple text file and had difficulty in picking up text from multicolumn and table-based documents. The latter was better at recognizing multicolumn and table-based documents, though not perfect.

Overall, the scanner is a good choice for small offices, but a little expensive.

Shekhar Govindarajan at PCQ Labs